The Ambassador (45 page)

Seven years later, Kremmling, Colorado

‘Darling, haven’t you finished yet?’

He waved her away. ‘Nearly. I just wanted to check this through. Then they can take it with them and read it on the fastjet. Won’t be a minute.’

She pouted. ‘Lunch has been ready an hour. We’re all starving.’

‘Let them get started. I’ll be down shortly.’

As the swirl of her silken patio pants disappeared across the tiled floor, he smiled contentedly to himself, pressed
Scroll
and found the passage in his diary he had been seeking.

The wedding. He had conducted it himself, as he was entitled to do under US law, in Air Force One several kilometres high above the Atlantic. The Prince and his Princess, still exhausted, she a little weepy, he withdrawn and unusually quiet, but both refreshed after making use of the shower and kitchen facilities on board, had stood side by side, leaning tiredly on each other as they exchanged vows. He had urged that they sleep on it first, but neither had had the capacity to rest. Not until long after disembarkation, the completion of formalities and President Kennedy’s welcome to the USA.

The rings had been his wedding gift. On the grass lawn outside he could see them still on their fingers, glinting gold in the sun, fashioned from the ores found in the red ochre hills in the distance. The man’s had had to be made smaller to fit the Prince, but that came afterwards, when they were at peace. The woman’s had fitted exactly, and he had felt his heart skip a beat as he slipped it on Lisa’s finger. In doing so he laid a much-loved ghost gently to rest, even as he handed his first European love over to her husband. For it had been his dead wife’s, and the Prince’s had been his own.

The terrible days of the failed uprising and its bloody aftermath had taken its toll. Infiltration meant that names were known; over five hundred had been arrested, Marius among them, but few had escaped or been seen again. It would have been excusable had either of them, alerted to the emotional turmoil ahead, suggested backing off from the commitment of marriage. But although he had put the issue privately to each, neither Lisa nor Marius wished to wait. They had been steadfast. And he had been proud to officiate, and to make their union a reality.

Yet it had done them much good, Strether reasoned, to have begun their married lives in a new country. Most of all, their child had been born in an environment where natural conception and birth were the accepted norm. Instead of second-class facilities with non-NTs, the finest medical arrangements were on hand. Both pregnancy and birth had been free of incident, though to the young parents it was a most wondrous journey. And that was true of Strether himself, the boy’s godfather, despite all the many calves he had eased into the daylight before he had ventured into the hazardous labyrinths of international politics.

The child had cemented their bond, all three, had become a symbol to them of new life, of hope. And of the urgent and absolute need to consider the future. No more could Marius act insouciant and pretend that tomorrow would take care of itself. No longer could Lisa retreat into scientific literature and talk as if wisdom came from a downloaded hard disk. Both had had to explore feelings they barely knew existed; both had learned, slowly and with
many stumbles at first, how to trust to inarticulate instincts and emotions. To the Ambassador they resembled intrepid travellers in a freshly discovered and unmapped continent. Which, indeed, both were.

The news from Europe continued to be patchy and disturbing. Strether had badgered CNN and the main news channels into taking a greater interest, pointing out (this, he found, worked) that if the front line in Europe weakened, the USA would be exposed to aggressive challenge from further east. It was no coincidence that his successor at the Court of St James was a noted military man from West Point. The possibility that USA servicemen and women might again have to spill blood on foreign shores did galvanise public opinion, but unfortunately the effect was largely negative. ‘A plague on all their houses’ was a frequent reaction. The Americas slid towards being more isolationist than ever.

With the help of the State Department, Winston’s minidisk had been transcribed, the material analysed and disseminated. A series of in-depth reports had been produced for public service broadcasting channels and repeated on numerous occasions, but there was scant evidence that the revelations were making much impact at the highest levels in Europe itself, where it mattered most.

So the Prince had become a tireless campaigner, travelling throughout the hemisphere and further afield, outlining what ailed the Union and how it might be rectified, even while declaring himself keen to end his exile as soon as possible. But the regimes in London and Brussels had deemed it best to ignore him and the other voices that spoke out. Rather, the focus of debate had continued to be in the USA itself, where fundamentalist opposition to genetic programmes intensified. No wonder the Prince was determined to go home.

Lisa too, Strether knew, was restless, and it grieved him. Stateside she was much in demand on the lecture circuit describing and denouncing the worst excesses of chromosomal intervention. On the other hand, the main employment she had been consistently offered in America – and it had been lucrative – was in the numerous private IVF clinics. There, she had explained to him in disgust, she would be expected in secret to ‘augment’ embryos before implantation, and to train technicians, also in secret, how to do it skilfully. In other words, to carry out exactly the kinds of enhancement that she herself now found so distasteful and which were banned by federal law. Apart from the absence of official approval, the main differences, it transpired, were that Americans desired more trivial modifications than Europeans: permanent slimness, delayed ageing and the high cheekbones suitable for television were the primary requests. And, for the females, naturally shiny hair, a straight nose turning up at the end, bigger breasts and Miss America legs. The male children were to be invested with untrammelled ambition, particularly to make money. Enhanced brain-power was not, on the whole, in demand. When Strether, in defence of his countrymen, suggested that that indicated satisfaction with what they’d got, Lisa gave him a withering look and did not respond.

With some difficulty information had been obtained about other, minor, changes. Porton Down had been temporarily closed when financial irregularities had been uncovered; Director James Churchill had been prosecuted, but charges were eventually dropped and he took early retirement. It reopened soon after with another NT in his post, pale-eyed if marginally younger, but otherwise so similar in appearance and philosophy that, Lisa declared dispiritedly, there had been no point in the hiatus.

Other clinics continued busy and more had been licensed. Packer International had become a prime mover in the business and, it appeared, held the main patents on the acceleration project. It might be some while before their deliberate creation, virtually overnight, of world-beating footballers and other super-talented sports stars would produce a backlash: but not, she expected, a clampdown, just more of the same in other commercial hands. In the modern Union, competition was touted as a fairer means of control than regulation. As for Rottweiler SS – which had dismissed some guards, and disciplined others – the firm had amalgamated with Group 4, Securicor and the Ministry of Justice Inc. The multinational company was quoted on a dozen stock exchanges, but the identity of its main backers remained a mystery.

The young family had disappeared from Strether’s line of sight. They would be sitting down under the trees at the white ironwork tables, plumping up cushions for the child and helping themselves to the food. Strether chuckled. They had been reluctant at first to eat either beef or lamb, until he pretended to be offended; on their return to Europe they would probably cause offence in their turn enthusing about their newly acquired tastes.

And to Europe they would soon be going. Although it was, of course, with Strether’s blessing, it was also with his profound regret. A great deal of heart-searching, debating late into the night with both Lisa and Marius, together and separately, had occurred. But the Prince had been asked – been begged, indeed — to take a post in a fresh administration in London, a ‘ministry of all the talents’ being put together by Prime Minister Bretherton.

Strether could not quite see which subtle distinguishing marks from its predecessors gave it such worth that the Prince was willing to consider serving in it; but Marius had murmured about shake-ups, and had mentioned a former colonel, a Michael Thompson who was to be Minister of Defence, and who had pledged to secure improvements. Several transatlantic vidphone calls with this soldier, conducted for hours in the middle of the American night, had set minds at rest, at least partially. It was no trap: the man was sincere, though how effective he might be remained to be seen.

An amnesty for political prisoners was to be declared as a mark of goodwill, so the Prince himself would be unmolested. The camps on the border were to be closed down. A ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ tribunal was proposed, on the lines of one in South Africa many years before, that might jog consciences and memories. Several other named non-NTs were to be Ministers, including two blacks. As Marius explained it to Strether, it was a challenge he felt he could not refuse. Especially as he had ‘come out’ as a non-NT, and had some pride in his new-found notoriety.

Had the dam broken? Would it be possible in future for non-NTs to assume their place at the highest levels of society, by merit alone? Might their own child one day grow up to be Prime Minister? Some parts of Europe had not found that difficult – Germany, for example, or Spain. But the French were adamant. They had created ÉNA in the first place, and still argued that its graduates alone should take the top three grades at the Commission. Their answer was to clone ÉNA itself, to seed mini-establishments in other regions. That had gone down well in Poland and Russia, where there was still a hankering for officials with labels, licentiates and built-in superiority. The English, to Strether’s mind, were the nation least amenable to fresh ideas. They were snobs, and preferred their upper classes entirely composed of insiders. The old school tie, they called it. And they still spoke as if they could
tell the rest of the world what to do.

Strether slipped a minidisk into the port and ordered the machine to
Copy
. Marius could use it in his powerbook, and would have it as a record of amazing and terrifying events, but also as proof, if needed, of the complicity of certain NTs in attempts to subvert the Union to their own ends. Given that their close relatives were in jobs throughout the higher echelons of the Union, there was no assurance that it could not happen again. Indeed, a live conspiracy still flickered in the eastern regions, where democracy was a newer introduction. The civil guards there had an uncanny resemblance to those Rottweilers sacked in the West. And since nobody had been executed, presumably the violent gene pool was still lurking and available. To Strether, it was the strongest argument in favour of capital punishment he could imagine.

If disaster were to be averted in future the best weapon was knowledge. Awareness of what
could
go wrong, allied with general vigilance, might prevent a recurrence. That, and a more finely developed ethical sense than had been apparent in the Union for decades to date.

‘You can’t tell science to quit,’ Strether murmured to himself. ‘You wouldn’t want to. But you can learn how to use it, limit it, even harness it to moral attitudes.’

He paused, then shook his head at the conundrum. At moments like this he regretted that his education, such as it was, had leaned more to the practicalities of animal husbandry and not at all to Bertrand Russell, Kant or Aristotle.

‘That’s exactly what they were doing – using science. Perhaps Lisa was right when she says it’s not the scientists’ fault. The thirst for knowledge is never slaked – they can never call it a day. Discoveries make possible choices that once were fantasy, or accident, or the gift of God. The researchers don’t say
how
to choose – that’s not their job. It is the responsibility of each of us to make those choices. To use our free will, but not selfishly. And to try to remain human beings in the process.’

From beyond the window came the sound of happy laughter. Ah, that they would stay, and let today last till eternity. But they could not.

‘I suppose,’ he said wistfully to himself, ‘you need to have the moral values embedded in society to begin with. You need to see human beings as ends in themselves, as valuable, however crooked or bent or disabled or incomplete. That takes some doing, because we all warm to beauty and shrink from the imperfect. But if we can break our own prejudices, everything else will follow.’

His wife reappeared, the pucker on her brow deeper and more genuine than before. He slipped the minidisk into a protector and instructed the machine to switch itself off. Then he stood and gazed at her in rapture.

She was not bent or incomplete. She was utterly lovely, still. The scar on her temple had healed without a trace. The split lips, the swollen eyes, were a forgotten nightmare. The magnificent figure was as breathtaking as before, the creamy flesh billowed splendidly over the silvery lace of her low-cut sweater. The trim ankles, the painted toes in their sling-back shoes, the confidence, the easy sexuality: all were voluptuously on show. The white-blonde hair was worn longer than in her working days, but suited her, framing the face and eyes with a soft, feminine grace. Best of all, as she had lost her gauntness, that heart-stopping smile had returned, and the highlighted spot by her lip was more entrancing than ever.

‘D’you know, darling,’ he murmured, as he slipped an arm round her waist, ‘I agree with Arthur Miller. I prefer you a little plump.’

His wife pinched his cheek. ‘You always did,’ she answered playfully. And Ambassador Lambert W. Strether the Fourth and his wife Marilyn Six, otherwise known as Marty, with a surname of her own for the first time in her life, descended the staircase hand in hand, and went out to eat a farewell lunch with their guests.